Rights

Yes, My Conservative Facebook Friends Can Be Just As Irrational As the Progressives…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A usually wise and measured conservative Facebook friend posted with approval a tweet by conservative pundit Matt Walsh, complaining about the father of a 15-year-old school shooter who killed two people and injured six others being charged after the tragedy. The killings (the girl shot herself as well, and died) occurred at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in December.

“Let’s just be honest about the pattern here,” Walsh wrote. “This is the third time that a parent has been charged for violence committed by their child. In every case, the parent has been white. There is violence committed in the streets of every major city every single day. You could blame the crappy, neglectful parents in literally all of those cases. And yet none of them have ever been charged.”

Wow, talk about the wrong hill to die on! Both of those other cases involved criminally negligent parents, and the father of the late shooter in Wisconsin may have been the worst of the three.

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The Unethical Attack On SNAP Expenditures On Coca-Cola Products and Junk Food

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Back in my first year of law school we studied a case involving poor D.C. residents spending financial assistance checks on non-essentials like furniture thanks to a special deal offered by a local store. My contracts professor, the legendary Richard Alan Gordon, gave an impassioned speech decrying the court’s conclusion that the store’s promotion was wrong and the money was misused. “Why is sustenance for the soul less essential than sustenance for the body?” he asked in his famous stentorian tones.

Okay, food stamp recipients spending them on Coca-Cola products is not quite in the same exalted territory as the life enhancements at the center of that case (I can’t recall it the case cite), but to me, the principle is the same. Conservatives are on the wrong side of this ethics debate. I don’t care if Coca-Cola makes a lot of money off of food stamps. People enjoy their products. They make people happy. Poor people deserve to be happy too now and then in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services Secretary, and Brooke Rollins, the Agriculture Secretary, both advocate stripping soft drinks and junk food from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. RFKJ has called for the government to stop allowing the nearly $113 billion program that serves about 42 million Americans to be spent on “ soda or processed foods.” “The one place that I would say that we need to really change policy is the SNAP program and food stamps and in school lunches,” Kennedy told Fox News. “There, the federal government in many cases is paying for it. And we shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.”

Well, one man’s poison is another man’s pudding. Rollins has said, “When a taxpayer is putting money into SNAP, are they OK with us using their tax dollars to feed really bad food and sugary drinks to children who perhaps need something more nutritious?” No, the correct question is whether Americans think that the poor and low of income should have taxpayers lightening their burden and allowing them to make the same choices regarding the pursuit of happiness that anyone else has, within practical limits.

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The Latest Evidence That However Much Contempt You Have For Harvard, It’s Not Enough….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The conservative Washington Free Beacon launched a thorough investigation into the ways Harvard University has deliberately sought ways to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling that affirmative action policies at colleges and universities are illegal and unconstitutional. (You didn’t expect the Axis media to do that, did you?) Last week, the project resulted in a damning report of how the Harvard Law Review engaged in—is engaging in—outright racial discrimination in selecting staff, authors and articles:

The law review states on its website that it considers race only in the context of an applicant’s personal statement. But according to dozens of documents obtained by the Free Beacon—including lists of every new policy adopted by the law review since 2021—race plays a far larger role in the selection of both editors and articles than the journal has publicly acknowledged.

Just over half of journal members, for example, are admitted solely based on academic performance. The rest are chosen by a “holistic review committee” that has made the inclusion of “underrepresented groups”—defined to include race, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its “first priority,” according to resolution passed in 2021.

The law review has also incorporated race into nearly every stage of its article selection process, which as a matter of policy considers “both substantive and DEI factors.” Editors routinely kill or advance pieces based in part on the race of the author, according to eight different memos reviewed by the Free Beacon, with one editor even referring to an author’s race as a “negative” when recommending that his article be cut from consideration.

“This author is not from an underrepresented background,” the editor wrote in the “negatives” section of a 2024 memo. The piece, which concerned criminal procedure and police reform, did not make it into the issue.

Such policies have had a major effect on the demographics of published scholars. Since 2018, according to data compiled by the journal, only one white author, Harvard’s Michael Klarman, has been chosen to write the foreword to the law review’s Supreme Court issue, arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. The rest—with the exception of Jamal Greene, who is black—have been minority women.

Nice. What does the race of an author have to do with the quality of legal analysis, which is what law review articles are supposed to be? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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Non-Citizen Speech Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Reason” (of course) has an article up headlined “Immigrants and Radicals Have the Same Free Speech Rights as Everyone Else.” That may be correct, but it’s not at all certain, and I’m not sure it’s ethically necessary either. (Shame on “Reason” for following the Left’s deliberate conflating of immigrants with illegal immigrants.)

Marco Rubio and the Trump Administration are asserting that foreign students, other aliens here legally but temporarily and illegal immigrants do not have the same rights of free speech as American citizens. This week, a federal judge in Massachusetts allowed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings involving non-citizen anti-Israel college protesters and activists to go forward on the grounds that the government is targeting protected speech and therefore chilling the free speech rights of foreign university students and faculty. American Association of University Professors v. Rubio was brought by the American Association of University Professors, that organization’s Harvard and New York University chapters, and the Middle East Studies Association alleging the “chilling” of non-citizen members’ activities by federal policy.  The plaintiffs allege that members of their organization “have, variously, taken down social media posts and previously published writing and scholarship, stopped assigning material about Palestine in class, withdrawn from a conference presentation, ceased traveling abroad for conferences, ceased engaging in political protest and assembly in which they previously participated, ceased teaching a course they previously taught, and foregone opportunities to write and speak at public events,” because they fear deportation.

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Yecchh! Pooey! Instant Ethics Train Wreck In Minnesota…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Nothing but dunces, villains and fools in this tale….

1.Unethical catalyst: In Rochester, Minnesota, a state that has gone certifiably nuts, home of the George Floyd Freakout and a government headed by Knucklehead Tim Walz while voters send anti-Semitic Rep.”Fuck you!”Omar to Congress, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix was at the playground at Soldiers Field Park when she found a young black child looking through her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag. The kid is a nascent thief and needs more attentive parenting.

2. First identifiable unethical adult: Hendrix, who upon discovering the invasion of her personal property called the child a “nigger.” That’s signature significance in 2025—indeed at least since the 19th Century. She’s a low-life racist, a blight on society, and deserves to be shunned and reviled. To Hell with her.

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Michigan Magistrate Judge Ray Kent, Fuddy-Duddy of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Who’s being unethical here? Obviously the judge thought it was the lawyer, and judges win these arguments. Still…

Federal magistrate judge Ray Kent was so offended by a law firm’s dragon logo appearing on each page of a plaintiff’s complaint that he struck the lawsuit filed by attorney Jacob Perrone on behalf of an inmate accusing jail officials in Clinton County, Michigan of being “deliberately indifferent” to her when she started vomiting. Perrone’s firm is called Dragon Lawyers, a perfectly acceptable name now that all but one state permits firms to have trade names rather than the traditional firm titles featuring the names of founders and partners. As you can see, the firm’s logo was embedded in the document….

…but faintly: I don’t see anything to flip out over, but flip the magistrate did. In his order Judge Kent noted that “each page of plaintiff’s complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multicolored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit, presumably because she is represented by the law firm of ‘Dragon Lawyers PC © Award Winning Lawyers. Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent,” Judge Kent wrote. “The Court is not a cartoon.”

And thus it was that Judge Kent gave Perrone’s client until May 5 to refile her lawsuit “without the cartoon dragon.” He also ordered her not to file “any other documents with the cartoon dragon or other inappropriate content.”

Various commentators, including the estimable Eugene Volokh, seem to think this example of a judge abusing his authority and throwing a fit over a law firm’s logo is funny. I don’t think it’s funny. True, Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(f)(1) allows a court to “strike from a pleading an insufficient defense or any redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous matter.” But how is the dragon logo for a firm named “Dragon” impertinent or scandalous? Calling the logo “redundant” is a stretch just because it was on every page: so what?

The issue isn’t worth fighting about, so the lawyer apologized; if he wanted to fight, I think he would have a solid First Amendment argument. I guess we should be grateful that the judge didn’t help an illegal immigrant avoid ICE by sneaking out the back door.

At least as far as we know…

“Cornell Just Doesn’t Get That Freedom of Speech Thingy” and Other Observations On a Campus Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Read this whole jaw-dropping NYT article (Gift link!) and see if you can find evidence of anyone ethical in the entire story. It’s kind of like “Where’s Waldo?”

1.The headline is “Cornell Cancels Kehlani Performance Over Alleged Antisemitic Statements.” The caption under the photo (above) adds, “Kehlani, a popular R&B singer, is being replaced as the headline act at Cornell University’s annual concert.”

Observation: If she’s a popular performer for her singing ability and presentation, her “alleged Anti-Semitic statements should be irrelevant. This pure cancel culture stuff. Still. How can Cornell teach anybody if its administrators learn nothing?

2. “In a 2024 music video for the song “Next 2 U,” Kehlani danced in a jacket adorned with kaffiyehs as dancers waved Palestinian flags in the background. During the video’s introduction, the phrase “Long Live the Intifada” appeared against a dark background.”

Observation: So what? The event organizers can tell her not to perform that number.

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A Letter From Harvard, A Response From Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Harvard’s president Alan Garber invaded my email yesterday with a “message to the Harvard Community,” of which, alas, I am a long-time member. It arrived on the same day that the University, with its almost 55 billion dollar endowment, announced that it was suing the government for having the audacity to withhold about 2 billion dollars in federal research grants. Here is Garber’s letter—-you can skim it or jump to the end: it is easily summarized as “How dare they?” …

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“What’s Going On Here?” Oh, Just the Usual Biased and Slanted Journalism Making It Impossible to Know What’s Going On Here…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I cannot describe how sick I am of this phenomenon.

Here is the Conservative Brief’s report on the recent decision by a judge not to take further steps enforcing his order that the Trump White House cease discriminating against the Associated Press following its refusal to embrace the President’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Headline: “Associated Press Loses Court Case To Regain Coveted White House Access.” But it didn’t “lose the case.” Still, the slanted analysis was reported as fact by the conservative news site PJ Media. Here’s the New York Times spin. [Let’s see if the Gift Link works this time…]. Headline: “Judge Rejects A.P.’s Challenge to New White House Press Policy, for Now.” For now. “The judge said that he needed more time to determine whether the new policy was discriminatory, but said that the elimination of rotating access for newswires was ‘facially neutral.’”

Here’s the Associated Press: “Judge won’t take further steps to enforce his order in AP case against Trump administration.” “U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who handed the AP a victory last week in its efforts to end the ban, said it’s too soon to say that President Donald Trump is violating his order — as the AP suggests. ‘We are not at the point where we can make much of a determination one way or another,’ said McFadden, ruling from the bench. ‘I don’t intend to micromanage the White House.’”

Having read these three reports and a couple more, what seems to be the story is that the judge who said that the White House couldn’t punish the AP for which name it chooses to call the Gulf by banning it from White House functions (thanks to the White House announcing publicly that this was its motivation, making the ban a government infringement on free speech), the Associate Press could not insist that it has special privileges due to its once-justifiable status as long-time trustworthy news source, and could be placed in rotation with other news services instead of keeping a regular, permanent spot in the press pool.

The judge made clear what his conclusion was: that the proverbial jury is still out on whether the White House is engaging in viewpoint discrimination, which it may not do, or simply treating the AP like any other news service. However, he did reject the idea that because the AP has been anointed with special deference by past Presidents, the Trump White House is constitutionally obligated to continue them.

Especially since the AP now sucks. (But the judge didn’t say that.)

“War Is Peace”: Kareem Abdul Jabbar on D.E.I…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On the 78th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking of Major League Baseball’s color barrier, the Los Angeles Dodgers, successors to the Brooklyn Dodger franchise that brought Robinson into the big leagues, hosted its traditional annual commemoration of the culture-altering event. For some reason Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, L.A. Lakers legend, was on hand to give a speech, and as a smart and articulate social commentator instantly proved that bias makes you stupid by saying,

“Trump wants to get rid of DEI. And I think it’s just a ruse to discriminate. So I’m glad that we do things like this, to let everybody in the country know what’s important. They also tried to get rid of Harriet Tubman. But that didn’t work. There was just uproar about that. But you have to take that into consideration when we think about what’s going on today.”

Oh.

A few points: D.E.I. is explicit discrimination, just of the anti-white male variety. How could banning clear discrimination be a “ruse to discriminate?” Would Kareem support DEI in the NBA when he was playing, which would have meant inferior white players taking the jobs of better black players in the interests of diversity? Why would a smart individual say something so self-evidently Orwellian?

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